Epiphany 4A January 29, 2023
Epiphany 4-A
1/29/23 St. John’s
Mt. 5:1-12: 1 Cor 1:18-31
One of the jobs I had before I went to seminary was teaching drama to young adults with mild developmental disabilities. It was a great job, a lot of fun and the students were great. Except there was this one guy who was hard to work with, guy with Down Syndrome, who had had some experience acting on TV, he was a little full of himself, not just in my group but others too. He was kind of difficult to work with, he thought of himself as a TV star.
And one day I was doing evaluations with the director of the program, and she said, well, what do you think about Chris? He’s got this attitude, you’re an actor, how realistic is it that he could have a career, is he delusional. I said, look, Vicki, he’s delusional, there are thousands of out of work actors in New York, people without Down Syndrome. It’s just a crazy idea. Well, didn’t I eat my words when Chris was again cast in a pilot for a show called, the show was picked up and ran for years and Chris became a full-blown TV star with his picture was on the cover of TV Guide, Time Magazine, he had fan clubs, people writing biographies of him and making a ton of money. Go figure. Didn’t I feel a little foolish. So Paul wrote “God chose what is foolishness in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are.”
When I read this passage, it always makes me think about my student Chris.
Paul is not talking show business, about the message of the cross, of course. The scandal of the cross. How what appears to be nothing but defeat and hopelessness, death and terror, actually could actually be a victory, the way to eternal life, for Jesus of course, but for us too.
Consider your own call, brothers and sisters, Paul says. The call of the church. Our call. We are in a very difficult time in history. People are just losing faith in organized Christianity, COVID has decimated church membership, we are digging deep for new ways to reach people. From a certain angle it could look pretty bleak. But we were talking about this at a gathering of interim pastors in the synod and one of the pastors said, “Well let’s remember brothers and sisters, it is in the times of greatest challenge that the church has always been most true to the gospel.” Has been most itself the risen body of Christ in the world. Wow, I thought, that is true. In the first century being persecuted by the Romans and being driven out of the synagogues by the leaders of the Jews. And yet think about the power of that early church after Pentecost and the coming of the Holy Spirit, “God’s weakness” says Paul, “is stronger than human strength.”
Some of us may have felt that personally – when we just feel done. When we felt helpless in the face of our problems and the problems of the world, when we felt we were too weak, not smart enough to handle what’s coming at us; and that in that moment we were able to give it to God, embrace the cross and God’s foolishness was stronger than our wisdom and God’s weakness was stronger than our strength.
It’s in this context that I hear the Beatitudes. When Jesus says as in our gospel reading today, Jesus: “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” Is that the “Low and despised” Paul is talking about whom God he says chooses. Because otherwise, in what universe are the poor in spirit blessed.” Jesus says, “Blessed are those who mourn; blessed are the meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers.”
When do the meek inherit the earth.? Not hardly in this world. Jesus was born into this world: dominated by force, the power of the Roman Empire. Into a world of Greek thought that held up intelligence and logic and philosophy as its highest values; that was blessedness to the Gentiles. And into a religious culture where blessedness came from following the Torah, the Law of Moses. Maybe some of us can relate to that. A world, where, as Paul says, the Jews demanded signs and the Greeks desired wisdom. And nobody nowhere wanted the poor or weak or ritually unclean, the disabled, at the bottom of society who certainly had no power, much less to inherit the earth. Nobody except Jesus. Nowhere except in the kingdom of God.
Because in the kingdom of God things are different, right. This is what Jesus, and Paul, are talking about. The message of the cross is strength through weakness, salvation through suffering the way God sees things. To us it seems foolish, to those who are perishing, but it is the power of God to the saved. It’s the cross that saves us. It’s what Jesus models for us in his life and death and resurrection, and that we see in his teachings that are reality in the kingdom of God. And that is where Jesus lives, who Jesus is, and it is where we are invited to go.
Where the first shall be last and the last shall be first. When the powerful are cast down from their thrones and the lowly lifted up. Where the hungry are filled with good things and the rich are sent away empty. Most of the time we live in and only see what John in Revelation calls “The Kingdom of this world” but once in a while we stumble into “The kingdom of our Lord, and of the Christ” where everything is upside down. That’s where Jesus wants to take us.
Years after my student Chris’s TV show had run its course, I was a pastor in Wisconsin and I saw in the paper that a rock and roll band that my student Chris was fronting was playing dates in Madison, it was touring. Still doing his thing. In the interview Chris said he didn’t care how he did it he just wanted to get out there and to be an example for other people with Down Syndrome. Chris was a person of faith, his family were Episcopalians, and apparently, he saw his fame as a call.
God works in mysterious ways. Because God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.